


If Found, Please Return To

by bonehandledknife (ladywinter)



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Gen, Reincarnation, and the winding story of how one grows a soul, caine is a reincarnation/recurrance of the father of all of seraphi's kids, shameless use of The Little Prince, what if seraphi started the caine splices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-16 18:19:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12348033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladywinter/pseuds/bonehandledknife
Summary: Seraphi sends the human commander, her heart, out against the rogue clones.And Wise—He does not return.He does not return,and she strides toward her factories and pulls up her love’s genetic code.That utter dog,she thinks,I will make him more loyal.Seraphi enjoys enjoys starting the cycle of new splices, enjoys making them dogs, enjoys naming them Caine, betrayer. These creatures with his face, they will obey; he will obey, even if he won’t love her for it.(“There’s something wrong with my DNA,” he tells Jupiter.)





	If Found, Please Return To

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted [2.16.15 on tumblr](http://bonehandledknife.tumblr.com/post/111220271005/fic-if-found-please-return-to)

Seraphi looks at High Inquisitor Wise and tells him, “Don’t go.” She tells him there is no need for him to be at the head of her Legion. She tells him there are many who are more expendable. 

“There are no one who is expendable,” he insists.

“I am your Queen,” she says, “Why do you not obey me.”

“You are our Majesty,” he says, “I do this for love of you, and our people. If you bear me any love in return, then you will let me do this.”

Seraphi sends the human commander, her heart, out against the rogue clones.

And Wise—

He does not return. He does not return, and she strides toward her factories and pulls up her love’s genetic code. 

 _That utter **dog** ,_ she thinks,  _I will **make** him more loyal.  _

Seraphi enjoys enjoys starting the cycle of new splices, enjoys making them dogs, enjoys naming them Caine, _betrayer._ These creatures with his face, they will obey; _he_ will obey, even if he won’t love her for it. 

 

___

 

The splices love her.  All the legions of Caine’s love her, utterly devoted, and the gorge increasingly sits in her throat as they, generation upon generation, throw themselves to their deaths at her command.

( _How disloyal,_ she can’t help but rage, _they go so easily. They leave like it's nothing._ )

She watches them gladly die for her. She watches them look back at her; look, but never touch.

She finds herself cold.

 

___

 

Every time Seraphi finds his Recurrence in the vast randomness of the human gene pool, Wise refuses the ReGenX-E. 

“Your Majesty,” he tells her, “There is no need. I’m a fisherman.” _(A sculptor, a contractor, a warrior, a cleaner, a pilot, a priest…)_ “These hundred years are enough for me, I don’t want you to spend a hundred people’s lives to extend it that much more.”

“They’re already gone, the ReGenX-E is already made!”

"A hundred people are already ‘dead’, you mean.  Say it honestly.  Instead let someone else, who needs it more, buy the time that those hundred lived paid for.” Wise smiles with his eyes full of delight as he looks at her.  His shoulders are unwound and at ease in her presence, satisfied and content.

“You’re worth more than them,” she insists. 

“No I’m not.”

“You are _above them_.”

And he pulls away from her. “Like you are above me, Your Majesty.”

He leaves his bed for the sea.  Didn’t return that night.  It took another three millennia before he Recurred again, this time in what will be known as Malaysia.

He always did love Earth, to her confusion. If he was not born on that dull planet he would somehow smuggle himself through the stars to land there, or somewhere that recalls its look and feel.

She names the son she begets from this occurrence Balem. 'Calm’ for the name of the ocean that his father so loved, even if Pacific was a wretched misnomer for that which took him.

 

___

 

Over the course of several millennia, Seraphi gets tired of watching dogs with his face die. It’s a simple thing to limit the production of the Caine splice to a single living version at a time. Even though she hates to keep him by her.

(Even though she loves to keep him by her.)

She sends Caine far away while Balem grows, to not corrupt the child. And Seraphi finds herself very busy.

She teaches her son how the world works, how there are pyramids that supports those at the top and how to keep the worlds spinning on the disc of the Verse. She teaches him how to craft their business, how to craft _people_. She teaches him how to rule and lets the money and power that flow to him make Balem everlasting and undying. She teaches him to treasure family above all else, and to obey her. (Everything that Wise would un-teach and call it wisdom.)

Balem, at least, listens.

And finally when Balem is old enough she brings Caine back to her, has Caine kneel before them, and teaches her son how to watch things die.

As the light leaves the splice's eyes, Seraphi strokes her son's ears which were tiny and rounded instead of large and pointed. Runs her fingers through Balem's hair, which he gets from her. Traces his cheekbones and chin, which are from his sire. They are merged together on his face, the two of them.

Never apart.

“You won’t leave me,” she says.

“Why would I, Mother? I love you.”

 

___

 

Wise stops recurring on Earth. She searches the Verse on Earth-like planets for him for centuries and he does not appear.

She starts putting off her treatments. Wears her wrinkles as tokens some corner of her mind hopes would draw Wise back; he had ever wanted to grow old with her and she had always refused. She stares at the blue planet, jewel of her holdings, and wonders where he is.

“Your majesty?" 

Seraphi jerks her head towards her splice. 

Wise looks calmly back. 

 _Had he been **here** all these centuries that I'd looked for him? How could this be? _ She thinks, appalled.

A splice's DNA is designed. A splice being a recurrence is an impossibility. Let alone an improbability. And yet.

"Your majesty?" Wise repeats. 

> "I wish there was a way that I could teach you there’s value in every thinking being,” General Wise murmured an eon ago, as they watched the synths and robots be de-commissioned after a Harvest on a planet three galaxies away from Earth. It would cost more for the units to be transported elsewhere and no money at all for the planet to retake the materials after a couple centuries. The ships were full-to-bursting after the Harvest and it was very easy to make more of the unit's AIs; little more than nine months, maybe eight, and they come out fully operational.
> 
> Wise protested at the waste.
> 
> “That’s not the Verse we live in,” Seraphi replied, “Not the Verse I helped make.”
> 
> Wise simply tilted his head at her, and looked at her. Only at her. But his face was a puzzle.
> 
> And 60 short years later, as the sunset’s call to prayer rang from his city’s minarets, he yet again refused the Nectar. She brought him Kalique, whom she bore for him, and bid him look at their daughter and _still_ refuse to extend his life. 
> 
> Wise looked at Kalique, “You are beautiful and strong and grown, and I have had many happy years of being your father. But I will not take time which is not mine.”
> 
> “Do you do this to punish me,” Seraphi said, icy.
> 
> “Nothing in this life is a punishment,” he replied, “Never doubt my affections or love or care, that is a thing separate from money and time and punishment. Please remember that." 
> 
> Wise passed as the moon rose. The two women’s anger rose with it.
> 
> "Why weren’t you enough?!” Seraphi asked.
> 
> “Why weren’t _you_?” Kalique left, the words drifting behind her, “This is _your_ fault. Do not dare use me to explain your failings." 
> 
> But Kalique paused at the doorway, as if wanting to say something more, or waiting for some response from her mother. 
> 
> Seraphi never found the words to explain her confusion at Wise’s stubbornness; never knew how to express the small parts of her that listened to Wise and that finds his sympathy an echo with the child-in-her, who trusted in people. Wise calls to the parts of her that don’t completely hate the Verse, and Seraphi has no way to convey her tangled guilt and shame.
> 
> She never really reconciled with Kalique in the end. They both waited for the other to bend, both knowing they had time to spare for the wait.
> 
> ___ 
> 
> Seraphi had given the full truth of herself to the Wise for whom she bore Kalique, hoping if she explained enough he might understand, and it didn’t work.
> 
> She found him the next time on Rome, a small globe more archipelago than landmass, circling Rigil Kent. She lifted him from the bloody life of a Centurion, and gave him nothing but beauty, ease, and comfort.
> 
> She gave him Titus.
> 
> She gave him lies.
> 
> And she gave him Nectar, Ambrosia as his people call it. She gave it to him for over 3,000 years, the longest yet she’d ever spent with a Recurrance. When he asked her where it comes from, she said simply that it is the food of the Gods.
> 
> "Shouldn’t I know the fullness of my duties, as a God?” he asked, always so earnest.
> 
> “You do not need to have duties here,” Seraphi replied.
> 
> But Wise was ever anxious to be of use to her. He threw himself into training for her protection, though she was rarely without guards, and his ears grew sharp, his words sly; he tried to be her eyes and ears, and she grows fond and lets him. She controlled his Verse, she thought, his readings and his schedule and the people he meets, and she has the power to hide enough of the world from him that he would never choose to leave.
> 
> Except she dreamed. She has eons lived and countless normal lifetimes spent with Wise, countless conversations, and she dreamed sometimes out-loud.
> 
> She woke up, heart pounding, to Wise shaking her shoulder. 
> 
> “Have we had that conversation before, then?” His face was ashen.
> 
> “Wise—”
> 
> “The Ambrosia, it is made from _people_?”
> 
> “Only a few,” she managed, throat raw.
> 
> “Few enough to number as a troop under my command?” he breathed, staring at her as if willing her to understand, “Few enough to know each of their names? Each one that fell for me, I would know their name.”
> 
> “They served you gladly,” Seraphi was sure, _how could they not?_
> 
> “How many was _served_ to me, then, with each drink, each bath, of the Ambrosia you’ve gifted me? Do you know?”
> 
> Seraphi could not answer.
> 
> “Do you know their names?”
> 
> Seraphi's teeth ground together.
> 
> Wise looked at her, after a pause, and nodded. Simply said, “Let’s go to sleep.”
> 
> When later he refused the Nectar, she was not surprised, only grim. She will do better next time. 
> 
> “We will lie better." She stood with Titus over the roman’s deathbed and Titus looked at her trustingly, hand in hers. "And we’ll keep him.”
> 
> “Yes, mother,” he said, and he didn’t yet realize he’d already begun saying un-truths.
> 
> "You will regret this," Kalique said, looking out the window, "You might do so out of love or care, but that is a thing separate from punishment, from everything that makes you Queen."

"Your Majesty?"

_Is this my punishment?_

Seraphi stares at Wise’s soul looking out from a splice's eyes. She rips herself from his gaze and strides at a near-run towards the sheafs containing the minutiae of Wise’s genetic code. She compares the data to fresh samples from various points on this Caine splice's body. She looks at the results. 

Lets out one long slow breath and sits down with it.

“Is something wrong your Majesty?”

It is a rare occurrence in nature for a person or creature to have DNA in one part of their body differ from the whole of it. But occasionally possible.  Chimeras.  Genetic Frankenstein monsters. Like two bodies stitched into one. A twin that absorbed the other, usually, resulting in a personage with two sets of DNA.

It is even rarer in splices, because their DNA is built to specification and then monitored. It should be an impossibility, and yet. And yet.

For all that this splice of Caine is perfect skin-deep... in his muscles and organs and bones he has somehow Recurred as Wise.

Seraphi stares at the less-than-human lycantrant and wonders at the value of a life.

 

___

 

Seraphi wonders for centuries, now looking past skin-deep. Sometimes Wise comes back as a Caine splice, sometimes not; they begin to blur together in her reckoning. Seraphi sometimes treats the splice as a natural recurrence, sometimes disastrously in front of others. It becomes increasingly messy to erase those who observe her slips.  She even makes him half-albino to help remind herself, but it works less and less.

Never does he do or say anything less than appropriate. He never argues anymore.

He is completely obedient. 

It is completely _wrong_.

She hysterically begins to think that she would trade a thousand years for even half a day where he might look at her as something other than Queen. Where those around her might look at her as something other than Queen.

Where she could look at _herself_ as something other than Queen.

 

___

 

The number of years she would trade rises.

 

___

 

She finds herself walking Earth, some version of Caine often by her side, to try and understand that dull backwater that Wise loved. Its people are brutish and scrabbling and she doesn’t especially find them dear; especially where they look upon her and think her something to own.

“Tell me, Caine, in your opinion: why would these people hold one’s heart?”

She occasionally travels as a storyteller, and they are childlike at her feet. She tells tales of other planets; of romans, of winged angels, of fae, of gods, of vampires and werewolves, demons and dragons, and other such things that might eat you. The children are appalled and yet beg for more. They are cruel to each other and it surprises Seraphi not at all. 

“I don’t know,” he begins slowly, “why these people would love each other so; I do not know them, they are not mine.” He hesitates and she sees this, and asks him to continue. “But if they _were_ mine I would know them. They— they live, so therefore there’s somewhere they belong, so they would always hold someone’s heart even if that someone is not me. They are someone’s pack.”

“And that makes them worthy?”

“I am a splice,” Wise is apologetic, halting, “It’s not my place to judge worth, what I find valuable is not comparable to what your Majesty might. My best boots are not fit to grace your feet. Likewise, I do not know why the people we’ve met here would be worthy but,” he struggles with what would be polite to say.

Seraphi feels like he’d only gotten so far today because she commanded it. She suggests, “But one person’s valuation does not hold true in different markets.”

She sees on his face that he disagrees, but is frustrated in finding an explanation. 

“Not 'value' but holding one's heart... 'It means to establish ties.’ ” Wise finally says.

“Where’s that from?” Seraphi hears how the words aren’t his own in the intonation, it sounded like a quote. 

The soldier brings out a sheaf, “It’s a novel that I found on Beta Orionis II on our last visit.”

“Read it to me,” Seraphi says to her lasting regret.

 

__

 

_“You are beautiful, but you are empty. One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you — the rose that belongs to me._

_But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars; because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or bloated, or even sometimes when she said nothing._

_Because she is my rose.”_

 

__

 

Seraphi stares at the planet under Harvest. The ships buzzing around it. Caine a silent guard at her back.

"Your Majesty." An aid presents to her the first ReGenX-E vial from the current crop, as per usual, for quality control. She looks from it to the Caine who looks back at her unquestioningly.

Over a hundred lives glow brightly blue in her hand.

She wonders, now, who was their Titus, their Kalique, their Balem. She wonders who was their Wise. (Their rose.)

She wonders if they have a Seraphi, who hurts as much as she does, with her heart standing next to her, at heel, spliced and warped by her own incomprehension and folly.

 

__

 

It’s several centuries thereafter when she finds she can’t resist anymore the lure of forgetting what it is to be Queen (and of knowing what it is to be anything else).

It will have to be Balem, she taught him the best. (Wise taught him the least)

He loves her enough to obey.

She writes her will carefully and gives temporary stewardship of her various DNA splices to the Aegis, not only of Caine but of her entire retinue. She tells Caine to stay behind as she visits Balem to make her last request.

But her dog slips his leash.

The last thing she sees is him bursting in and Balem turning towards the splice with rage distorting his face.

 

__

 

Some hundred years later yet another splice named Caine Wise is born, and grows, and eventually finds himself with the sudden all-encompassing urge to tear out Balem Abrasax’s throat.

So he does. 

It’s satisfying. And he doesn’t even know why.

 

“There’s something wrong with my DNA,” he tells Jupiter.

Because why would she smell of home. Why would the sharp chemicals under her fingernails be soothing. Why would the callouses on her fingertips be precious. Why would her irritability, her empathy, and her rage at the world settle him and confuse him and sound like a bell finally, _finally,_ ringing clear.

Why would he search her under-developed planet again and again, under any excuse, expecting to find something missing that he can’t even put a finger on. 

Caine doesn’t even like the place.

 

(But _she_ likes Earth, something in him murmurs. She will return here.

And he will follow.)

**Author's Note:**

> [Genetic Chimera's are wild](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_\(genetics\)#Tetragametic_chimerism).
> 
> Quote from [The Little Prince](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2180358-le-petit-prince).


End file.
